Eclectic and striving never to follow paths into ruts, the OF Blog focuses on essays, reviews, interviews, and other odds and ends that might be of interest to fans of both literary and speculative fiction. Now with a cute owl for your enjoyment.

Saturday, September 04, 2010

Was busy all of Friday either working or sleeping, so time to catch up with a few matters:

First off, Jeff VanderMeer has a new NY Times Sunday Books review column that hopefully will become a regular, recurring feature. In this column, he reviews four books, including Karen Lord's debut novel, Redemption in Indigo. I hope to have my own review of Lord's book up by Monday night, but his review of her book, Karin Lowachee's excellent The Gaslight Dogs, and two other notable 2010 releases are well-worth the link-click. Let me know what you think of them, as I've read three of them and want to read the fourth in the near future!

Although I had intended the "interview" questions below to be a spoof of what I consider to be "canned" questions, I see quite a few of you have taken it seriously and have provided some good insights to how and why you blog. Here are a few that I have found so far (and please respond if you have answered these on your blog and I missed it):

A new site launched this week during the WorldCon convention in Australia. Cheryl Morgan's latest venture, Salon Futura, has now gone live and I have to say that I like what I've seen out of this debut effort. It doesn't try to be the venerable Emerald Citys redux, but is something different in scope while still being quite good. Check it out here. And if you have an hour to spare, be sure to listen to the podcast round table discussion of international SF with Gary Wolfe, Nnedi Okorafor, and Fábio Fernandes.

And finally, last but certainly far from least, it's football time in Tennessee! Although doubtless I'll hear it when Jeff's Gators play my beloved Vols in a couple of weeks, I'm still going to be excited whenever my alma mater begins play. And now, eine kleine Volsmusik.

Have a good Labor Day weekend for those here in the US and just a regular good weekend for those who celebrate May Day instead.

That being said, I am rather disappointed that I did not recognize the questions. I have laughed at Pat's interview questions more times than I can count and Aidan's interview is still fresh in my mind.

Heh, yeah, it may have seemed a bit silly to answer what were obviously cut-and-dried standard interview questions, but some of them got me thinking enough that I figured in the end, it was worth a blog post. :p

That being said, though, in simply trying to find a reply to them that was more than, "Uh, I don't know," I really began to pity all the people who gets asked such questions in interviews. They're good questions, sure, but they're so generic that it really doesn't seem there's a good way to give a good answer to them.